CIA collusion with “Al Qaeda” financiers and attack planners

(WAYNE MADSEN) WMR has learned from an intelligence source from a NATO country that elements of the CIA have coordinated their activities with top Gulf state officials who have been connected to “Al Qaeda” networks that have planned and financed various terrorist attacks.

A number of the “Al Qaeda”-associated officials are veterans of the CIA’s war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, including a top prince of the Al Thani royal family of Qatar who also serves as a government minister. The prince, who was shot twice in the back while fighting with the Afghan mujaheddin against the Soviets in Afghanistan, maintains close relations with the Taliban in Afghanistan and serves as a conduit between the CIA and both the Taliban and “Al Qaeda.”

The prince maintains contact with “Al Qaeda’s” financial network through contacts in Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates. The regional security officer for the British embassy in Dubai, believed to be an MI-6 official cover, maintains contact with the Qatari prince and his “Jihadist” financial and logistics network in Abu Dhabi and Dubai. This network, allowed to operate with CIA and MI-6 knowledge and soft support, also, according to our source, involves a top official in the government of Abu Dhabi who is close to the Abu Dhabi royal family.

In 2006, Qatar’s interior minister, Sheikh Abdullah Bin Khalid Al-Thani, rejected a civil judgment against him by a New York federal judge stating that he harbored Al Qaeda’s number three man Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and tipped off Mohammed before a CIA attempt to arrest him in 1996. In fact, WMR has learned that the CIA station at the U.S. embassy in Doha, Qatar, has been a key link between the agency and the “Al Qaeda” support network in recent years, even in late 2001 when Al-Thani was accused of harboring both Mohammed and another Al Qaeda operative, Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi, who was later allegedly killed by U.S. forces in Iraq.

Another individual with whom the CIA in the UAE maintains close contact is Osama Bin Laden’s former financial adviser, a British-Mozambican UK citizen, who once lived in Bin Laden’s home in Saudi Arabia where the “Al Qaeda” leader received various diplomats from countries that included Britain and the United States. A cousin of Bin Laden’s financial adviser served at the British Consulate General in Chicago, from which financial support was given to “Al Qaeda” operatives in the United States.

Chicago FBI agents Robert Wright and John Vincent began investigating the Al Qaeda money trail links between Chicago area terrorist cells and Bin Laden after the East Africa U.S. embassy bombings in 1998. However, their investigation was spiked by FBI headquarters in Washington.

Another FBI agent who was getting close to the connections between “Al Qaeda,” the Saudi government, and the CIA and MI-6 was John P. O’Neill, the top FBI agent assigned to investigate Al Qaeda. O’Neill discovered the Western intelligence and Saudi/Gulf connections to Al Qaeda but was subjected to a pre-retirement theft of his briefcase that contained classified documents on his investigation. After his stormy retirement from the FBI, O’Neill was hired by Kroll Associates as the head of security for the World Trade Center and after only a day or two on the job, died in the collapse of the World Trade Center.

According to a French DGSE highly classified intelligence document received by WMR, Bin Laden remained under the operational control of the CIA and Britain’s MI-6 until 1995. In July 2001, just weeks before the 9/11 attacks, French media reported that Bin Laden was visited at the American Hospital in Dubai by Larry Mitchell, the CIA’s station chief in Dubai. Bin Laden maintained accounts at Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), associated with various CIA operations in the years of the mujaheddin war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. With the knowledge and approval of the CIA, those accounts shifted to other banks after the collapse of BCCI in 1991. Mossad and Middle East banking sources have told WMR that those banks include Citigroup, the National Commercial Bank of Saudi Arabia, and HSBC.

One place where “Al Qaeda” operatives, mostly Saudis but a few nationals of other Middle East countries like Lebanon, often rub shoulders with CIA and MI-6 “liaisons” in Thailand, particularly Bangkok and Pattaya. Ironically, Bangkok was the site of one of the CIA’s secret rendition prisons where “Al Qaeda” suspects were tortured.

Southeast Asia is a preferred place for weapons transfers from Western intelligence agents to the “Al Qaeda” and “Jemaah Islamiya” operatives. Last week, the Philippine Coast Guard intercepted the M/V Captain Ufuk as it entered Manila Bay carrying a cargo of Israeli Galil assault rifles. The Captain Ufuk has a Georgian crew, South African captain, Panamanian registry, and had began its trip in Turkey with an intermediate stop in Indonesia. The Philippines is reported by the CIA to be a center for “Al Qaeda”-affiliated “Abu Sayyaf” terrorist activity. It appears that the CIA and their Israeli friends know much more about the Abu Sayyaf activity as they did about the 2002 nightclub bombing in Bali.

Writing in the Atlantic Free Press on January 15, 2009, Tim Gatto reported: “The main attempt of the administration was to invent a huge group of militant Muslims operating in 87 countries that was led by Osama Bin Laden. The name of this Washington invention was called al Qaeda. This in Arabic means The Base. It was originally a database.

“This is what Wayne Madsen wrote about al Qaeda: ‘Shortly before his untimely death, former British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook told the House of Commons [and wrote in The Guardian] that “Al Qaeda” is not really a terrorist group but a database of international mujaheddin and arms smugglers used by the CIA and Saudis to funnel guerrillas, arms, and money into Soviet-occupied Afghanistan.’

“Al Qaeda” has apparently extorted large sums of money from the governments of the UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, Oman, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait as ‘protection insurance’ against ‘Al Qaeda’ terrorist attacks within their nations. One such scheme involved a threat to bomb the foundations of several new high-rise skyscrapers on Sheikh Zayed Road in Dubai. The CIA/MI-6 network in the Gulf is also reported to sanctions the Sh’ia Mahdi Army operations in Iraq that have been responsible for a number of deadly terrorist attacks against U.S. and allied troops and Iraqi military and civilian targets.

“An important liaison between the CIA and Bin Laden was Bin Laden’s assistant, Ali Mohammed, an Egyptian Army veteran who was officially reported to have been rebuffed by the CIA when he tried to become an agent but was gladly hired by the Special Warfare Center in Fort Bragg, North Carolina as an instructor. Ali Mohammed trained some of those who would later serve with the CIA’s Special Activities Division and Blackwater. Ali Mohammed was yet another link between the CIA and ‘Al Qaeda.’”

WMR’s intelligence source has attempted to inform U.S. military authorities about the connections of the CIA to the Qatar/Abu Dhabi/Dubai “Al Qaeda” jihadist network but was told by a U.S. Army captain at Tallil airbase in Iraq that his safety could not be ensured by the U.S. military.

WMR has learned from our intelligence source that the CIA’s assassination team predates the George W. Bush administration and that it was used for special assassination “wet affairs” jobs during both the Clinton and George H. W. Bush administrations.

The CIA used a wealthy intermediary in Switzerland who manipulated the market in high-dollar art sales to provide money for special CIA accounts maintained at Bank Hofmann in Zurich, acquired by Clariden Leu AG in 2007. Bank Hofmann, a private bank that also maintained branches in Geneva and London.

Another private bank used to launder CIA hit squad operations was Trufinco of Zurich. Money laundered by the CIA from stolen artwork was reportedly handled by a CIA entity called the Boecking Trust which used various free ports around the world to hide stolen artwork. Some of the paintings stolen and sold by the CIA were to rich Saudis at Marbella in Spain and included four paintings held by the late Princess Diana at Bank Leu, one Van Dyck, two Rubens, and one Rembrandt. Bank Leu, also known as Clariden Leu, is also reportedly a front for secret CIA banking. Ironically, the bank was used by two U.S. spies for Russia, CIA agent Harold Nicholson and FBI agent Robert Hanssen, to maintain secret bank accounts to hide their payments from Russian intelligence.

The CIA assassination covert operational infrastructure also had direct links to CIA fronts in Panama, Japan, France, Italy, Monaco, and Texas. Some of the CIA wet affairs officials also had close relations to former President George H. W. Bush in Texas. There were also links between the CIA death squads and top officials of the Pakistan Muslim League-Quaid, the party of former Pakistan dictator General Pervez Musharraf, as well as large Japanese yakuza organized crime families linked to the Liberal Democratic Party. The CIA hit teams also received funding from narcotics smuggling through the agency’s joint operations with the yakuza, Golden Triangle warlords in Burma, and Colombian paramilitary narco-terrorists tied to the government of Colombian President Alvaro Uribe.

Former CIA Executive Director Alvin “Buzzy” Krongard is reported to have helped cement the relationship with Blackwater USA to conduct post-9/11 assassinations for the CIA. Krongard was chairman of Alex, Brown Brothers and vice chairman of Banker’s Trust after its acquisition of the Baltimore-based securities investment firm. After he left the CIA, Krongard became a member of Blackwater’s advisory board. His brother, Howard “Cookie” Krongard, served as Inspector General for the State Department, and, according to four State Department IG officials, Ron Militana, Brian Rubendall, and John DeDona, ordered them to immediately cease their investigations of Blackwater’s State Department contracts.

Two ex-Blackwater employees have submitted affidavits in the U.S. Court for the Eastern District of Virginia in Alexandria that connects Blackwater to criminal activities, including weapons smuggling, money laundering, murders of whistleblowers, and prostitution, charges that dovetail with WMR’s latest information that CIA assassination teams were involved with hiding and funding their activities through deals with criminal syndicates in Japan, Europe, Southeast Asia, Colombia, and the Middle East.